Attorneys general ask Supreme Court to review Microsoft data case

Arizona and 32 other states have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether email service providers can shield evidence of a crime from U.S. law enforcement by storing data on servers located outside the United States.

The 33 states − led by Vermont – filed a legal brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review and reverse a lower court’s decision involving Microsoft data stored on a foreign server. Under the Stored Communications Act (SCA), an email provider who receives a search warrant for evidence of a crime must disclose the requested data to the requesting law enforcement agency. But in this case, Microsoft argued compliance with the warrant was not required because the data was stored on a server outside of the United States. Microsoft asserted it would be an impermissible extraterritorial application of the SCA to require the company to retrieve data from a foreign server, even though Microsoft could access that data from its offices in the United States.